University of Virginia Library

IV

Since the Italian "Argomenti" and the Valgrisi woodcuts were first published together, it seems probable on purely a priori grounds that there would have been a certain measure of collaboration between the author of the arguments and the artist of the woodcuts—if only to the extent of one consulting the other's work, when it was possible to do so, as well as the text of the poem itself. They seem in fact to have agreed on a common approach, each working towards the same ends according to the potentialities of his own medium. However, neither Ruscelli in his "A i lettori" nor Harington in his advertisement to the reader say very much about the function of the arguments in the context of the book as a whole. Ruscelli writes merely: "Gli Argomenti in ottaua rima, che habbiamo posti in questo Libro di Canto in Canto, sono del Signor Scipione Ammirato, giouane di belle lettere, di felicissima vena, & di molti studij." Harington, true to form, is a little more forthcoming, but not much: "Also (according to the Italian maner) I haue in a staffe of eight verses comprehended the contents of euery booke or canto, in the beginning thereof, which hath two good vses, one, to vnderstand the picture the perfecter, the other, to remember the storie the better." What is common to these two editorial comments about the arguments is that they draw attention to the fitness of their form and their location. The arguments are written in the same verse-form as the poem itself (Italian or English), and they are "posti . . . di Canto in Canto" "in the beginning thereof". Like the plates with which they are associated, the arguments serve the double purposes of introduction and recapitulation, whetting the reader's appetite to continue and at the same time helping him to remember and consider what he has read. However the forty-six stanzas (Italian or English) may also be read in sequence, as a miniature version of the whole poem. The sequence bears a certain resemblance to a "corona" of sonnets, and one suspects that readers may sometimes have attempted to use them as epitomes, as a substitute for reading the poem itself at length.

In the Italian arguments, all the main-springs of the plot—characters, motives, actions, consequences—are neatly abstracted and fixed in the reader's memory by a variety of means: crisp characterization (especially of the villains in the story), repetition of key words and names, and a complex syntax in which much use is made of participles, phrases in apposition, and so on, in order to give at least some idea of the connections between the various stages of the plot. The final couplet of one stanza is regularly echoed in some

way in the next one's opening lines, so that the stanzas are linked together in sequence in a way that imitates and represents Ariosto's own effects of liaison between cantos. Harington's practice of breaking up Ammirato's long, complex sentences into a number of shorter and simpler ones does introduce some obscurities of time-sequence, motivation, and the like, and for the sake of brevity Harington rather more frequently relies on bare proper names, lacking characterization or with the characterization much reduced. Thus "Pinabel di Maganza, traditore" (II:vii), for example, becomes plain "Pinnabel" and Gabrina, instead of being called "la vecchia odiata e vilipesa" (XXI:iv), becomes merely a "most unvvorthy wight". Sometimes, also, the connection between the final couplet of one argument and the opening lines of the next is lost or weakened by absence of repetition. It is reasonable to assume that all such changes were forced on Harington by technical difficulty, but there are also other changes in the English arguments which seem to be clearly deliberate departures from the Italian, made in order to present the poem in a different light or to offer different interpretations. The argument to Book VII, for example, is one of several made to conform with the moral and allegorical interpretations of the story given in Harington's end-of-canto notes, and there the English wording departs so radically from Ammirato's Italian that it can almost be considered free composition.

In the Valgrisi edition, more often than not, the first and last lines of the "Argomenti" correspond closely with the beginnings and endings of the narrative sequences as they are represented in the woodcuts; indeed, the artist's comprehensive method of illustration ensured that practically everything mentioned in the "Argomenti" would be represented somewhere or other in the woodcuts—if only one has the patience to find it. In the Franceschi edition, the correspondences between the plates and the "Argomenti" are not so close, for reasons that have already been explained: the different choice of principal scenes, the greater prominence given to them, the lack of illustration of later episodes in the cantos, and so on. Generally speaking, Harington's book has much the same measure of correspondence between plates and arguments as Franceschi's book has—less than that of the Valgrisi edition, but still present in varying degrees from canto to canto. In some cantos practically everything in the argument is illustrated; more often, the beginning but not the end of the argument is illustrated; in only one quite exceptional instance—Book XXVI—nothing mentioned in the argument is represented in the plate (except "Merlins well") and nothing illustrated in the plate, except the well, is mentioned in the argument. In what way, then, did Harington mean the arguments to help the reader "to vnderstand the picture the perfecter"? When it comes to close reading of the plates, the arguments are clearly of no help, but with the principal scenes it is different. A number of Harington's alterations in the arguments seem quite evidently to have been made in order to bring them into better accord with the principal scenes of the corresponding or following plates. His practice is by no means consistent, and one could wish that a few more such alterations had

been made; but there are enough of them to be sure that Harington deliberately sought by this means to achieve or to restore in the context of his own book not only a good correspondence between arguments and plates but also a clear sense of liaison from canto to canto. It is necessary to list and briefly to describe a fair range of examples: Porro redesigned Plate I so that Charlemagne and the battle are brought to the foreground. Moreover Harington seems to have taken the Christian defeat at "Burdells", and not Angelica's flight, as the true starting-point of the poem: cf. I:5-10; VIII:64.8 (Ariosto, VIII:72.8); and XIV:1 mn. These lines, for which there is no equivalent in the Italian, match the illustration of Dalinda's story in Plate V. Porro in Plate XIV gave much greater emphasis than the Valgrisi artist did to Agramant's musters. Harington reinforces the emphasis by repetition, and characteristically chooses not to emphasize Orlando's single-handed feat of arms. Harington's alteration in line vii brings the argument into better accord with the proeme to Book XXI, where Zerbino is presented as an example of good faith and the keeping of promises, however difficult (cf. XXI: Moral). The alteration in line viii is more significant, since it shows Harington's characteristic treatment of a canto-break handled untypically by Ariosto and by Porro. In the final stanza of canto XXI Zerbino hears the sounds of fighting and screaming—they are Pinabello's dying screams. The resumed narrative in canto XXII gives only a brief anticipation of Zerbino's discovery of the as yet unnamed corpse; the story will be told fully in canto XXIII. Porro's Plate XXII, unlike the Valgrisi woodcut, omits the corpse and has for its principal scene the next episode of Astolfo at the palace of illusions; Porro is reserving the corpse for the foreground of Plate XXIII. Harington, tender-hearted as usual, omitted Pinabello's dying screams from the translation. The eighth line of his argument thus removes a source of considerable potential embarrassment in translation, narrative, picture and design. This is an example of a change made in order to bring the argument more into line with the interpretations given in the notes. In writing the notes of allusion to Book XXIII, Harington borrowed what he wanted from Fornari and Lavezuola, but he deliberately omitted Fornari's description of Orlando's madness as something altogether uncommon, grand, and marvellous (cf. McNulty, p. xxviii, where the passage from Fornari is quoted). His treatment of the argument is precisely similar. Plate XXVII has Doralice's bolting horse as its most conspicuous foreground feature. The incident is interpreted allegorically in the notes to Book XXVII. Porro's Plate XXIX illustrates Rodomont's rage and, unlike the Valgrisi woodcut, does not illustrate the manner of the hermit's death—Rodomont hurls him into the sky and out of the story (Ariosto and Harington: XXIX: 6-7). Porro's Plate XXXVIII, again unlike the Valgrisi woodcut, omits Rogero's departure. Harington was no doubt glad to follow suit for the sake of some extra syllables, and could feel free to do so since Rogero's departure to serve his King is lengthily praised in the proeme. Harington here brings forward the "poco lieto" from Ammirato's argument for canto XLIII. The earlier Italian arguments make no mention of Brandimart's death-wound but emphasize Orlando's victory and the defeat of the infidel champions. In Plate XLII, Brandimart lies wounded in the foreground, but the motive for the change is almost certainly literary, not pictorial. Harington chooses to prepare the ground for the sad and solemn ending of the love-story of Brandimart and Fiordeliege.

One last example may be given here, out of sequence:

Is it too fanciful to suggest that the translations here are intended to make up in some measure for the loss of the full-page plate illustrating Rogero's rescue of Angelica? That Harington was determined to give prominence to the "naked" and "bound" Angelica, somehow or other? The lines at least do something to repair the botched translation of the stanzas in the narrative: Harington, X:81-85; Ariosto, X:95-99.

At their best, the canto divisions in Harington's book are extraordinarily well handled, especially where plate and argument appear on facing pages. A canto-beginning is carefully prepared for in the endings of the previous argument and of the previous canto itself, and on turning over the leaf a wealth of information is displayed through several media: pictorial, poetical, typographical, even marginal. Plate complements argument, proeme complements both (and is the reader's entry-point into the new canto), the topic of the proeme is picked up and developed in the notes (and there may well be a marginal reference to the notes),[26] and with any luck the very stanzas illustrated in the principal scene of the plate will be there on the facing first page. Particularly good examples of this kind of collaboration among all or nearly all of these elements may be seen in Books I, IV, VII, X, XIV, XVI, XVIII, XXIII, XXVII and XXX, and there are many others which, though less good all round, still offer many delights—particularly in the plates. However,

a good many of the plates do not in fact face the canto-beginnings, but appear overleaf on the preceding recto. This is a puzzling aspect of the design of Harington's book and of the Italian editions as well, even though the puzzle may largely be a twentieth-century one. Sixteenth-century readers may have found the arrangement more tolerable than we do. (McNulty in his critical edition very properly, but anachronistically, had all the plates arranged to face the canto-beginnings.) Since the plates do have their retrospective qualities, their appearance on the preceding rectos can no doubt be considered a fair second-best; but second-best it certainly is, and so also it seems to have been considered by the sixteenth-century editors. Of the forty-six plates, thirty-three appear on versos facing the canto-beginnings in the Valgrisi and Franceschi editions. In Harington's book, only twenty-seven of them do—leaving nineteen that appear overleaf. Before examining this question further, it is necessary to consider more closely than we have yet done Harington's method of annotating each canto.